Free Republic

...Long the stuff of science fiction, so-called "seasteading" has in recent years matured from pure fantasy into something approaching reality, and there are now companies, academics, architects and even a government working together on a prototype by 2020. At the center of the effort is the Seasteading Institute, a nonprofit organization based in San Francisco. Founded in 2008, the group has spent about a decade trying to convince the public that seasteading is not an entirely crazy idea. ...The project is being partially funded by an initial coin offering, a new concept sweeping Silicon Valley and Wall Street in which...

Interesting here to see transhumanists again talking about moving offshore—literally!—to avoid government regulations. -- Mellonkronos “Researchers, Ahoy! Should Futurist Science Move… Offshore?" By Nikki Olson November 9, 2014 http://transhumanity.net/researchers-ahoy-should-futurist-science-move-offshore/ What is the likelihood of seeing research vessels devoted to scientific research outside the bounds of national jurisdiction? The idea of relocating for the sake of circumventing law, in particular the notion of establishing new nations in international waters, is an idea typically initiated with liberty in mind. The Principality of Sealand, for instance, established in 1967, was founded with the intention of creating a space free from “oppressive laws and...

Pay Pal founder and early Facebook investor Peter Thiel has given $1.25 million to an initiative to create floating libertarian countries in international waters, according to a profile of the billionaire in Details magazine. Thiel has been a big backer of the Seasteading Institute, which seeks to build sovereign nations on oil rig-like platforms to occupy waters beyond the reach of law-of-the-sea treaties. The idea is for these countries to start from scratch--free from the laws, regulations, and moral codes of any existing place. Details says the experiment would be "a kind of floating petri dish for implementing policies that...

Milton Friedman's grandson Patri has a vision that might have made the economist proud: to build a floating libertarian nation 12 miles off the coast of California.Billed as "Burning Man meets Silicon Valley meets the water," the planned nation flotilla would be constructed on a variety of barges and water platforms within sight of San Francisco. It would include everything from homes, schools and hospitals to bikes for transportation and aqua farms for food.Despite the widespread skepticism that the project is bound to invite, Friedman already has secured more than $2 million in venture capital for the development, which strives...

Here's a novel idea: Escape the suffocating chains of intrusive government by starting your own country! That's Patri Friedman's idea. He comes from an impressive line of libertarian thinkers. Milton Friedman, the Nobel-prize-winning free-market economist, was his grandfather. His father is David Friedman, author of the libertarian classic "The Machinery of Freedom." Milton Friedman advocated severely limited government. David Friedman thinks we need no government at all. And now Patri believes he has an effective solution to bad government: communities on the ocean surface, or seasteading. As a fan of the free market, Friedman understands the benefits of competition. The...